Internet search engines allow a user to more efficiently locate desired websites on the Internet. In response to a search query received from a user, a search engine provides the user with search results containing a list of websites responsive to the search query. Typically, a brief description of each website is provided along with a hypertext link (hereinafter “link”) that the user clicks on to be directed to the corresponding website.
As the number of websites accessible through the Internet continues to increase, the manner in which websites are returned from a search query becomes increasingly important. For example, a common search query may return thousands of websites in which significant sites may be buried. Thus, the order in which websites are displayed within a search result is very important to enable a user to quickly identify the most relevant websites.
The order in which websites are displayed may be improved by monitoring which websites, within a particular search result set, are clicked by a user. By monitoring which websites the user clicks, the search engine can use this information as one factor in determining the order of various websites within the search results. Websites that receive a lot of clicks (or “hits”) are likely more relevant to a particular search query than websites that the user does not click. Thus, these websites can be moved up in the order of returned search results so that the user can locate relevant websites more quickly.
One problem with current methods for recording user clicks is that the methods introduce additional latency which negatively impacts on the user's experience. For example, some search engines record user clicks by redirecting the user through the search engine's server to the server containing the requested website. In this scheme, each link in the search results includes a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that points to the search engine's server. The URL for the website associated with the link is typically appended to the end of the search engine URL.
When a user clicks on the link, a request is sent to the search engine's server. The search engine receives the request, logs the URL associated with the website, and then redirects the request to the URL associated with the requested website. The server containing the requested website receives the request and sends the website data to the user's computer. This process of redirecting the user through the search engine server introduces an additional round trip to the load time for a website request. This additional round trip typically increases the latency experienced by the user by approximately 100 ms or more. This added latency is noticeable to the user and thus negatively impacts upon the user's experience.
What is needed is an improved method for recording user clicks that reduces the amount of latency experienced by the user.